The present invention relates generally to information technology (IT) management and, more particularly, to systems and methods for performing self-healing tasks using IT management data.
Many enterprises require assistance managing and administering computer data centers. In general, a data center is a facility that centralizes an organization's information technology (IT) operations and equipment, and where it stores, manages and disseminates its data. Data centers may include, for example, financial management systems, payroll applications, customer relationship management systems, web services, resource planning systems, database applications, and other systems and tools. In general, data center administration is the process of establishing applications, servers, and networks, and ensuring their integrity, recoverability, security, availability, reliability, scalability and performance.
Various Information Technology (IT) Administrators may be required to manage a data center environment. Certain tools and software have been developed in an attempt to assist IT Administrators in the management of data centers, including software to automate certain IT management processes. In some instances, a service provider in communication with a client data center may provide so called “virtual engineers” (VEs) to react to monitoring system alerts and ticketing system service requests generated at a client data center. The VEs may automatically perform management steps using appropriate predetermined standard operating procedures (SOP) in response to alerts or requests generated at the client data center. The VEs may perform some tasks which would normally be performed by human system or IT Administrators to diagnose and remediate problems and to implement service requests. Such systems may utilize so called eBonding services to synchronize the service provider's alert and ticketing systems with client specific monitoring and ticketing systems. Such service providers may centrally store execution and configuration item data (e.g., server data), which is used to match VEs to system alerts and service requests, connect to target endpoint servers, and communicate with monitoring and ticketing systems.
Inevitably, problems are encountered which cause such VEs to fail. For example, automatically matching a request with an appropriate VE can be difficult due to inconsistencies in the types of requests received by the service provider. For example, the template for a request to address a shortage of available data storage space from a first client may be different from the template for a request to address a shortage of data storage space from a second client. Moreover, changes in the tools and systems utilized by client data centers may result in changes to the type and format of requests being received by the service provider.